by | Mar 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
What if we ordered our habitual gatherings around Christ and the gospel story more than twice a year?
This is the time of year when we pause our calendars to make space to celebrate Holy Week—rehearsing the gospel events leading up to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
For centuries, Christians have followed a church calendar to mark seasons and special days honoring Jesus and the gospel: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time (which marks the time periods in between Lent and Advent). And while most non-denominational churches are familiar with these in theory, they tend to only participate in one or two throughout the year.
We might hand out palm leaves on Palm Sunday or meet for evening worship on Good Friday—and we almost always celebrate Resurrection Sunday with far more pomp and circumstance than our usual services. Later, in December, we might do something special for each of the Sundays leading up to Christmas. But some of these other historic church events, like Ash Wednesday or Pentecost Sunday, for instance, are most often observed in more liturgical traditions and denominations.
Expecially for “low-church” Christians, the idea of following the church calendar generates mixed reactions. As inheritors of both the Protestant Reformation and evangelical revivalism, many non-denominational believers pride themselves on not adhering to tradition—which is sometimes viewed as manmade and unbiblical, meant only for Catholics, and even a stumbling block to authentic faith and worship. It’s not uncommon to hear, “It’s not a religion; it’s a relationship,” and for such events to be likened to the “religious festivals” seemingly downplayed in Col. 2:16.
And so, on the Monday after …
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by | Mar 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christian journalism has become even more important after the government passed a tough new national security law.
Editor’s Note: Hong Kong officials unanimously passed its own version of a national security law Tuesday that could put people found guilty of political crimes, such as treason or external interference, in prison for life.
Article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, mandates the enactment of a national security law, which locals have protested in the past over fears that it could curtail freedoms. Now with a pro-Beijing parliament, the bill was passed at record speed.
John Lee, the city’s top leader, said the new law was needed to close gaps in the existing national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. He hailed its passage as “a historic moment Hong Kong people have been waiting for over 26 years.”
A coalition of 77 international parliamentarians and public figures, including Hong Kong’s last British Gov. Chris Patten and US Sen. Marco Rubio, have issued a statement condemning the Article 23 legislation, calling it a “flagrant breach” of the Basic Law, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and international human rights law.
While many Hong Kongers have left the city, others, like Lo Man Wai, editor in chief of the Christian Times newspaper, have decided to stay. He writes here about his work in Hong Kong as the city undergoes unprecedented changes.
In the past four years since the implementation of the first national security law, Hong Kong has experienced a seismic shift. Many citizens who have been devoted to this city for decades, including prominent pro-democracy activists, journalists, opinion leaders, social workers, and politicians, have disappeared from the public sphere. Some have been detained; others are in exile. Still others remain …
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by | Mar 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
Timothy P. Carney’s Family Unfriendly explores plunging American fertility and how to get out of the baby bust.
In 204 B.C., the Romans imported a new foreign cult. When the barge bringing the cult statue to Rome got stuck in the shallow waters of the Tiber, an aristocratic young woman, Claudia Quinta, miraculously pulled the rope to draw it in single-handedly. As her name tells us, she was the fifth daughter in her family.
The reason this story first stood out to me years ago is the same reason it came to mind while reading journalist Timothy P. Carney’s new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be: Fifth kids are rare. Not coincidentally, they’re hard. “Comedian Jim Gaffigan has offered a vivid description of having a fifth child,” Carney writes. “Imagine you’re drowning. And someone hands you a baby.”
Fifth daughters were rare in ancient Rome for a different reason than they are in modern America, where we no longer have to provide good dowries to contract marriages for each girl (though college tuition might be a comparable expense). Rather, the contemporary US has joined the rest of the West—and a rising share of the Global South—in an unprecedented, apparently unrelenting baby bust. Not only are fifth kids uncommon these days, even second kids are increasingly rare, and the number of childless singles and couples is at a record high. Economics are just one factor here. We’re looking at a major cultural shift.
Just how bad are things? “The average thirty-five-year-old American woman in 2020 had just above 1.5 kids, which is the lowest number on record,” Carney notes. This is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children, and it’s bad news for everyone—though many don’t …
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by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Annual report grades 198 nations and territories, with 9 in 10 harassing believing communities. China and Nigeria score the worst.
Government restrictions on religion are at a global high.
Social hostility toward religion, however, has ticked downward.
So concludes the Pew Research Center in its 14th annual analysis of the extent to which 198 nations and territories—and their citizens—impinge on religious belief and practice.
Some sort of harassment of religious groups was recorded in all but eight.
The 2024 report, released earlier this month, draws primarily from more than a dozen UN, US, European, and civil society sources, and reflects conditions from 2021, the latest year with fully available data.
The global median on Pew’s 10-point scale of government restrictions reached 3.0 for the first time ever, continuing a steady rise since the baseline score of 1.8 in 2007. Overall, 55 nations (28%) recorded levels marked “very high” or “high,” only two lower than last year’s total of 57.
Nicaragua was highlighted for harassment of Catholic clergy.
Regional differences are apparent: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) scored 5.9, up from its baseline score of 4.7. Asia-Pacific scored 4.2, up from 3.2. Europe scored 3.1, up from 1.7. Sub-Saharan Africa scored 2.6, up from 1.7. And the Americas scored 2.1, up from 1.0.
Pew’s 20 measures of government restrictions included efforts to “ban particular faiths, prohibit conversion, limit preaching, or give preferential treatment to one or more religious groups.”
Some pertained to COVID-19, such as Canada’s fines against open churches.
A further 13 measures for acts of religious hostility by individuals or groups included “religion-related armed conflict or terrorism, mob or sectarian violence, harassment over attire for religious reasons, …
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by | Mar 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Joy Clarkson peels back the veil of overfamiliarity from commonplace expressions and images.
I’m afraid these men would only slow me down,” says a cocksure Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of the godfather of computer science, Alan Turing. A 2014 biopic, The Imitation Game, portrays Turing as a lonely, world-changing genius who reluctantly takes on help from less intelligent colleagues who’d only threaten his efficiency and from whom he has to hide secrets that threaten his clearance, career, and life. As it turns out, he will need his friends’ help to keep his job, and together, they crack the Nazis’ Enigma code and create the prototypical model for a computer, the Turing machine (this is history, not a spoiler!).
One of Turing’s many contributions to the development of computing intelligence was the Turing test—a method designed to probe a machine’s ability to display intelligent behavior a human observer might confuse for human behavior. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way in that department. In (successfully) designing computers to match and exceed many aspects of our own cognitive faculties, we find ourselves in a chaotic battlefield where grim doomsday jeremiads about AI and utopian techno-optimist manifestos vie for the soul of humankind.
Guiding these rapid-fire developments is a powerful metaphor: the human mind as computer. And the more we use this metaphor, the more readily we come to believe it. And yet, as this mindset has infused itself into our collective unconscious, it’s been met with more and more resistance.
Consider philosopher and cognitive scientist Tim van Gelder, author of the 1995 essay “What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?” In it, he suggests that the Turing machine (a computational model) is less helpful for …
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